Over the past several years, personal communication devices such as pagers and cellular telephones have become widely used in both business and personal environments. Fast and reliable communication has made it much easier for people to travel from their home or office without becoming unavailable to co-workers or others. The advent of portable computers has also encouraged this trend, as many people perform a large amount of their duties using computing devices, and the portable or “laptop” computer further enhances the ability of people to remain productive while traveling.
More recently, pagers have been introduced into the market with increased data handling capabilities. As one example, the PageWriter™ 2000 manufactured by Motorola is a two-way pager with a keyboard and graphical display which sends Internet e-mail and has automated message handling capability. In addition, computing devices have been enhanced with additional communication capabilities. U.S. Pat. No. 5,550,861 to Chan et al. for example, describes a PCMCIA format card for laptop computing applications which includes an onboard modem and pager unit.
Despite these trends in combining communication and data processing capabilities, little progress has been made in taking advantage of the available benefits of the combined implementation of such devices. The current state of the art consists essentially of conventional communication functions coupled to conventional data processing functions, thereby producing one device which may combine previously available features but which does nothing to provide additional functionality. In addition, advantageous hardware implementations of such combinations have not been explored.